There appears to be a gender attractiveness gap, but it fades away with age.
Think for a moment about the person in your life whose presence costs you the most energy. Not someone who has genuinely wronged you in a clear, identifiable way, but someone whose small habits and ordinary behaviour produce, in you, a reaction that is consistently bigger than what those habits or that behaviour would seem to warrant. The colleague whose tone of voice puts you immediately on edge. The relative whose certainty about politics or food or anything else triggers in you an irritation you cannot fully explain to yourself. The friend of a friend you have decided, on insufficient evidence, that you do not particularly like. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, working in the early decades of the twentieth century, paid sustained clinical attention to this kind of disproportionate dislike, and proposed that it has a specific psychological mechanism behind it. The mechanism, he argued, is that the parts of other people that bother us most acutely are very often the parts of ourselves that we have refused to recognise — repressed into a region of the psyche that he eventually came to call “the shadow.”
The shadow, in Jung’s mature formulation, is not the same as “the bad parts of you.” According to the Society of Analytical Psychology’s reference on the Jungian shadow, drawing directly on Volume 9 of Jung’s Collected Works, the shadow consists of “the hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality” — but it also contains “good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses.” Whatever the conscious self has refused to identify with, for whatever reason — whether out of shame, out of social training, out of fear, or simply out of inattention — becomes part of the shadow. The shadow, in Jung’s clinical experience, is then projected outward. The person carrying it tends to see, with unusual intensity, those very same qualities in other people, while not seeing them in themselves at all.
The specific clinical mechanism Jung proposed was psychological projection — the unconscious attribution of one’s own disowned traits to someone else. Jung was emphatic that the process is automatic and largely outside conscious awareness. “Everyone carries a shadow,” he wrote in his 1938 essay “Psychology and Religion,” “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” The more vigorously a person represses an unwanted aspect of themselves, in Jung’s view, the more vividly they tend to see that same aspect in other people, and the more strongly they tend to react to it. The reaction, importantly, is not in proportion to anything the other person has actually done. It is in proportion to how much energy the perceiver is spending on keeping the same trait outside their own self-image.
The first clinical implication of this framework is that the people we find most difficult are, in a quiet sense, diagnostic. They are pointing — usually without any intention of doing so — at material in our own psychology that we have not yet acknowledged. A person who finds laziness intolerable in others, Jung suggested, is often someone who has not made peace with their own desire to rest. A person who reacts disproportionately to the arrogance of others has often suppressed their own ambition. A person who is harshly critical of vanity in their colleagues has often disavowed their own desire to be seen. The shadow does not invent these patterns; it inherits them from whatever the conscious self has refused to admit. The disproportionate reaction is the marker that something has been refused.
Jung was a clinician, not an experimentalist, and his framework was developed primarily through case work, dream analysis, and theoretical synthesis rather than through controlled studies. The empirical psychology literature has been mixed on whether his specific claims hold up under laboratory conditions. The general concept of projection — that people attribute their own traits to others — turns out to be well-documented, but in a form somewhat different from what Jung proposed. The form Jung described, where specifically repressed or disowned traits are projected outward, was disputed by mid-20th-century empirical psychologists, who could not consistently demonstrate the effect in laboratory studies.
This changed substantially in 1997. According to a 1997 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Leonard Newman, Kimberley Duff, and Roy Baumeister, defensive projection of the kind Jung described does occur, but through a specific mechanism: when people try to suppress thoughts about the possibility that they have undesirable personality traits, the suppression makes those trait concepts more cognitively accessible, and the accessible concepts then get used disproportionately when interpreting other people’s behaviour. In experimental terms, the Newman team showed that people who both avoided thinking about having threatening personality traits and denied possessing those traits also readily inferred those same traits from ambiguous behaviour by other people. The effect was robust across multiple studies and replicated in subsequent work. The Jungian clinical observation, after seven decades of contested empirical status, turned out to be partially correct, with a mechanism somewhat different from the one Jung had originally proposed but converging on the same basic phenomenon: what we cannot tolerate facing in ourselves, we are unusually quick to perceive in others.
The clinical work that Jungian analysts have developed around the shadow concept over the past century has focused on a specific therapeutic move: taking back the projection. In practice, this means noticing the people and situations that produce a disproportionately strong reaction, asking what specific quality is triggering the reaction, and then asking honestly whether that same quality exists, in some form, in oneself. According to the International Association of Analytical Psychology’s institutional reference on shadow work, “the integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process” in the Jungian tradition. The IAAP framing notes that complete integration is impossible — the shadow contains material that extends beyond the individual into what Jung called the collective unconscious — but partial integration substantially changes the person’s experience of other people.
What changes, in this account, is the energy spent on rejecting other people for traits they may or may not actually possess. Once a quality is acknowledged as also present in oneself, the unconscious need to police it in others tends to subside. The colleague who used to be intolerable becomes, often, merely a colleague. The relative whose certainty was unbearable becomes someone whose certainty is one feature among many. The friend of a friend, met fresh, turns out to be more interesting than first impressions had suggested. The change is not in the other person. The change is in the perceiver’s relationship to a previously hidden part of themselves.
Honest framing requires noting what Jung’s shadow framework does not establish. It is not a comprehensive theory of why all difficult relationships are difficult. Some interpersonal conflict is straightforwardly about real disagreements over real things — values, resources, mistreatment, incompatible needs — and is not reducible to projection. Some dislikes are accurate appraisals of genuinely difficult people. The shadow framework applies most clearly to the specific subset of reactions that are disproportionate to their apparent cause, persistent across multiple instances, and surprisingly resistant to factual correction. Not every dislike is a projection. Some are simply dislikes.
The framework also makes no promise that meeting the shadow eliminates difficulty. Some relationships remain difficult even after substantial inner work, because the difficulty was never about projection in the first place. What the framework does seem to do, both in the clinical literature and in the experimental work that has followed Jung, is reduce the specific kind of disproportionate reaction that comes from disowning parts of oneself. The mechanism is not magical and the change is not total. But the pattern — that the people who bother us most are often pointing at material we have not yet been willing to claim — appears to be real, and the work of meeting it is, by every clinical and empirical account that has examined it, one of the more reliable ways to make the small irritations of ordinary human life take up somewhat less space inside a single person’s head.
The post Carl Jung observed that the things we cannot stand in other people — the small irritations that seem disproportionate, the people we find ourselves unable to forgive — are almost always reflections of the parts of ourselves we have not yet acknowledged, in a quiet psychological pattern he called the shadow, and the surprise is that doing the work of meeting it tends to soften nearly every difficult relationship a person carries appeared first on Space Daily.
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For five years, an elderly woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease had spoken mostly in single words, needed help walking, and showed little spontaneous interaction with the people around her. Then, roughly 19 hours after receiving a high dose of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, she emerged from a prolonged, deep sleep-like state and began talking about her life.
The striking episode, described in a new case report published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, does not show that psilocybin reverses Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers are careful to stress that this was a single patient, observed in a real-world private clinical setting without brain imaging, formal sleep monitoring, or standardized cognitive testing.
Still, the study’s authors say the case raises the interesting possibility that in late-stage dementia, some functional abilities may indeed remain dormant rather than be completely lost.
“Advanced Alzheimer’s disease is generally regarded as a stage of irreversible functional decline,” researchers write. “This case documents transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following psilocybin administration.”
The case involved a Japanese-American woman in her 80s with a 10-year history of Alzheimer’s disease. The patient was described as being in an advanced stage of dementia, with the previous five years being noted for severe decline.
Her speech had become mostly monosyllabic, and she had chronic urinary incontinence, executive dysfunction, dysphagia, dependent mobility, flat affect, prolonged somnolence, and a severe reduction in spontaneous communication.
Her diagnosis had been made clinically about a decade earlier, based on a steadily progressive neurodegenerative course, memory impairment, language reduction, executive dysfunction, and functional decline.
The intervention was a single oral dose of 5 grams of psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the “Enigma” strain. Researchers note that no established psilocybin dosing framework exists for advanced dementia, and the dose was high by almost any comparison.
Recreational users commonly describe 1 to 3 grams of dried Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms as a typical range, while doses around 3.5 grams or more are generally considered strong. A 5-gram dose is often treated as an especially intense experience. However, direct comparisons are imprecise because psilocybin content can vary widely between mushroom species, strains, batches, and even different parts of the same mushroom.
The study also notes that the dose was “relatively high compared with dosing approaches commonly used in modern clinical trials,” which typically use carefully measured amounts of purified psilocybin rather than whole mushrooms.
One month later, after some improvements persisted, the patient underwent a second supervised session using 3 grams.
The first session produced a dramatic acute response. The patient experienced autonomic activation, profuse sweating, suspected hyperthermia, and what the researchers describe as a prolonged deep sleep-like state. Exact temperature measurements were not available.
The study’s timeline shows that the first 12 hours were dominated by autonomic and sleep-like effects. At about 19 hours, the patient spontaneously awakened and produced roughly four hours of autobiographical speech.
By the first day, she showed increased alertness and recognition of family. By the second day, she was independently walking. By days two and three, she was dressing herself and showing spontaneous initiative. Around the same time, her diapers remained dry, including at night.
The improvement in continence was particularly notable to researchers because urinary control depends on more than a single simple reflex. It requires awareness of bodily signals, executive inhibition, and coordination among brain networks affected by dementia. The report states that the patient remained continent one month after the initial session, which was one reason a second session was performed.
During that second session, the patient reportedly remained more verbally expressive and described positive imagery involving surfing with her son on a peaceful island.
Researchers also observed improved facial expressivity, emotional reciprocity, spontaneous humor, and greater agility while walking. At one point during follow-up, the patient spontaneously said, “It is pleasant to come here.”
The study’s broader importance is in what it may suggest about the brain in advanced neurodegenerative disease. Alzheimer’s is usually understood as a progressive condition in which neurons and networks progressively deteriorate, stripping away memory, communication, mobility, and autonomy. By the advanced stage, treatment is largely supportive, and meaningful functional recovery is generally considered unlikely.
Psilocybin, however, is known to transiently alter large-scale brain dynamics via activation of the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. Researchers point to prior human neuroimaging studies showing changes in default mode network integrity, network segregation, and functional connectivity after psilocybin administration. They also cited preclinical research suggesting psychedelics may promote structural and functional plasticity, including dendritic growth and synaptic remodeling.
That does not mean psilocybin repaired the patient’s Alzheimer’s disease. Instead, researchers suggest a more measured interpretation. The drug may have temporarily altered brain network activity, allowing remaining functional systems to reintegrate or become accessible again, at least for a limited period.
The report does not claim that plaques, tangles, or neurodegeneration were reversed. It also does not show that other patients would experience similar results. Because this was a single case, there was no control group, no placebo comparison, no formal biomarker confirmation, and no standardized cognitive testing to measure the degree of change.
Researchers acknowledge that mixed or alternative neurodegenerative contributions, including vascular components, cannot be fully excluded. Although they found no evidence of acute delirium, intoxication, or another acute neurological diagnosis during the observation period, the case remains observational. Causality cannot be established, and fluctuations in neurodegenerative disease cannot be completely ruled out.
The safety picture is also incomplete. While no severe persistent adverse effects, prolonged agitation, clinically significant cardiovascular instability, persistent psychotic symptoms, delayed neurological deterioration, or delayed medical complications were observed during follow-up, the acute phase included suspected hyperthermia and profuse sweating. In frail elderly patients, especially those with advanced dementia, such responses could carry serious risks.
For that reason, the findings should not be read as a green light for unsupervised psychedelic use in dementia patients. Psilocybin is still a powerful psychoactive compound, and older adults with complex neurological disease may be especially vulnerable to complications.
Ultimately, the value of the report doesn’t lie in providing a treatment recommendation but in documenting an unusual clinical observation that researchers say warrants controlled investigation.
The case also lands amid a flood of scientific interest in psychedelics as tools for studying brain plasticity, perception, memory, and large-scale network dysfunction.
As The Debrief has previously reported, recent brain-imaging work has found that psilocybin can temporarily dissolve familiar brain-network patterns tied to the sense of self, while other studies suggest psychedelics may redirect visual processing toward memory-related regions. Additional research has analyzed how a single dose of psilocybin may produce lasting brain changes, how the compound can reshape neural pathways associated with depression, and how psychedelic effects may be influenced by factors such as exercise, food restriction, and immune signaling.
However, most clinical work with psilocybin has centered on psychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance use disorders.
More recently, researchers have begun asking whether similar neuromodulatory effects might have relevance for people with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s disease.
Published clinical data involving advanced dementia remain extremely limited, which is why the new report is best understood not as evidence of a treatment, but as a provocative case study that may help guide future controlled research.
This recent case does not prove efficacy, but it questions assumptions about what may remain possible in a brain already deeply affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
If future studies find similar effects under supervised conditions, the implications could be significant, not only for dementia care but also regarding understanding how much latent function can persist beneath the outward appearance of severe decline.
“Residual functional capacity may persist in advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may become transiently accessible following psilocybin induced modulation of large-scale brain networks,” researchers conclude. “Systematic investigation is warranted.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
New experiments suggest humans have a hidden counterclockwise bias.
In the literature related to the powerful entheogen dimethyltriptamine (DMT), it is often reported that individuals claim to have had encounters with what they perceived as non-human entities during their DMT experiences. Descriptions related to these powerful visionary experiences range from what some describe as insect-like forms and machine-like intelligences, to what some describe as conscious entities associated with intricate geometries.
For years, many researchers have regarded these reports purely as hallucinations generated by the human brain while under the influence of the psychedelic compound. However, past studies have never directly tested whether these reported entities could represent something other than internally generated hallucinations.
Now, a recent preprint paper outlines a path toward testing this assumption experimentally.
A collaborative team from the Trace Institute and the nonprofit Noonautics has released a preprint titled Traces of the Other –Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism. The study presents a mathematical framework for understanding the human psychedelic experience and outlines experiments designed to test its primary hypothesis.
The research was led by Professor Emeritus Donald Hoffman, founder of the Trace Institute, and Dr. Andrew Gallimore, a neurobiologist and pharmacologist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and head of Noonautics. The preprint is currently awaiting peer review.
According to some figures, as many as 45% of the individuals who take a sufficient dose of DMT report experiences involving non-human beings. People describe these entities as intelligent and autonomous, and report similar experiences across different cultures and backgrounds.
Typical hallucinations tend to draw on material from memory, such as familiar faces, animals, or places. By contrast, encounters with other humans appear in less than 5% of DMT encounters.
The authors of the new preprint study argue that these reports are difficult to reconcile with conventional accounts of pure hallucination and that the consistency of reports regardless of culture, location, belief systems, and other factors warrants deeper investigation.
The project draws on Hoffman’s theory of conscious realism, which proposes that interacting conscious agents fundamentally constitute reality. In this framework, the physical world as humans perceive it functions more like a user interface than a direct view of objective reality. According to this theory, conscious agents of varying levels of complexity may exist beyond what humans normally perceive and go unnoticed in everyday life.
The researchers propose that DMT changes the perceptual interface, allowing consciousness to access regions where normal perceptual constraints are absent. In these regions, it may be possible to detect traces of other conscious agents. Hoffman says the project “will provide a new framework for exploring the effects of psychoactive substances such as DMT on the structure and function of spacetime.”
Testing these ideas has become possible due to past work involving technical development by Gallimore and researcher Rick Strassman. Typically, a DMT experience lasts only three to five minutes, which is not long enough for structured experiments. The extended-state DMT protocol, called DMTx, uses a controlled intravenous infusion to maintain a stable experience for up to an hour, allowing researchers to adjust the dosage as required.
That controllable window makes experimentation possible. “With a theoretical foundation for the highly unusual state of consciousness induced by DMT, we can test these theories experimentally,” Gallimore says.
The proposed experiments are designed so that if the external-agent hypothesis is incorrect, the results will be negative. In one protocol, a computer in a sealed room randomly displays either blue or yellow, and a subject under DMTx attempts to learn the hidden color by interacting with an entity. Another experiment involves two isolated subjects under DMTx who try to transmit a random word to each other through a shared entity, a process that would be difficult to explain solely in terms of internal brain mechanisms.
The researchers acknowledge several limitations. Cooperation from entities cannot be guaranteed, results depend on subjective reports, and expectation bias is difficult to rule out. The preprint continues to treat the hallucination model as the default explanation for these entities. What distinguishes this work is that the hypothesis is now formulated in a way that allows for experimental testing.
“This collaboration is a first step to a mathematics of altered states of consciousness and, ultimately, for engineering our perceptual interface to expand our view of reality,” Gallimore says.
Hoffman and Gallimore will discuss the research publicly on Saturday, June 13, 2026, at the Lighthouse Campus at the historic Venice Beach Post Office in Los Angeles, with video to follow on YouTube.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Labubu dolls have become a global sensation, helping to turn blind boxes into a billion-dollar business. The idea seems to go against one of the basic rules of shopping: people usually want to know exactly what they are buying before they pay for it. Yet millions of consumers willingly purchase blind boxes without knowing which […]
The post Why Labubu’s blind box strategy works so well appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
For years, people around the world have reported being disturbed by a low, persistent droning sound of unknown origin.
Often described as more of a vibration than a specific tone, this sound has become widely known as “The Hum,” a phenomenon that is more frequently reported in certain cities and specific areas than others.
Over time, possible explanations have included industrial ventilation systems, military sonar experiments, and, in some online discussions, extraterrestrial signals, although none of these theories are supported by evidence.
However, in a recent study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), published in PLOS ONE, researchers now offer evidence that, for most people who experience this phenomenon, the source is probably not external, but instead may actually originate within their own auditory system.
Residents of Bristol, England, first widely reported The Hum in the mid-1970s, when the Bristol Evening Post received several reports from people who claimed they experienced hearing a strange, low sound. People initially thought the industrial fans in an area warehouse were responsible, but the hum persisted after the warehouse shut down.
By the 1990s, reports of a similar phenomenon began surfacing in Taos, New Mexico, where residents described a persistent, diesel engine-like rumble. Both state and federal authorities investigated the sound but could not explain it. The Taos Hum became one of the most studied and widely recognized examples of this phenomenon. Since then, similar reports have come from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and several European countries.
As reports grew, people proposed explanations ranging from ocean-generated infrasound to military sonar and CIA transmitters. Some online discussions have even suggested alien technology as a possible cause. In 2012, Canadian teacher Glen MacPherson, who first experienced The Hum on the west coast of British Columbia, created the World Hum Map and Database Project to document cases worldwide. The project has since collected thousands of entries.
To investigate the phenomenon, Professor Markus Drexl at NTNU recruited 28 people in Germany who all reported hearing a persistent, unexplained humming sound. Clinicians refer to this as a low-frequency sound percept, or LFSP. Most participants described the sound as having a frequency around 50 Hz, about the same as a deep mechanical rumble.
The research team tested two main explanations: whether participants had unusually acute sensitivity to low-frequency sound, or whether some were perceiving sounds generated by their own inner ears.
“We know that there are people who hear low-frequency sounds that can actually be measured, even if other people don’t hear them,” Drexl said. “But it’s not so easy to find the source of these sound waves, because it’s a struggle to localize low-frequency sounds.”
The cochlea, a spiral-shaped structure in the inner ear that converts sound waves into neural signals, also actively amplifies incoming sounds. This amplification produces faint sounds emitted from the ear, known as spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAEs).
Most people are not aware of these emissions. In rare cases, people perceive SOAEs as tinnitus. Drexl’s team investigated whether people who hear the Hum might be detecting a low-frequency version of this phenomenon.
The results did not support this idea. The team found no low-frequency SOAEs in any participant. The hypothesis of unusually acute low-frequency hearing was also not supported; while a few participants had slightly better low-frequency hearing than average, most did not.
“Even though the group we tested was small, it still means that the hypothesis of having especially good hearing for low-frequency sounds does not hold for most people,” Drexl said.
This left a third group: participants who reported hearing something that no external instrument could detect. “Then there are people who hear something that cannot be measured objectively. We believe people in this category have a form of low-frequency tinnitus,” Drexl said.
The Hum differs from typical tinnitus because most people who experience it first believe the sound comes from an external source, sometimes spending years searching for its origin before realizing it is internal. The researchers still have not ruled out external causes completely. In some cases, near industrial sites or coastlines, genuine low-frequency sources may exist. However, researchers identified no external source for most participants in the study.
“Based on our results, although we haven’t ruled out cases of physical external sound sources, we suggest that subjective tinnitus in the low-frequency range is often the cause of hearing pulsations of low-frequency sound perceptions,” Drexl said.
The study also highlights that the low-frequency range of the auditory system remains poorly understood in hearing science.
“What we know about the hearing system is mainly based on how we capture and process sound with higher frequencies. We know less about how the auditory system handles and processes low-frequency sound, or infrasound,” Drexl said.
Although the cause of well-known cases like the Taos Hum remains unresolved, the new findings suggest that many reports of unexplained low-frequency sounds may actually originate from within the auditory system rather than from an external source.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
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